Writerly Roles

There are two major “writerly roles” that I use in my everyday life. The first one is the Facebook/text message writing in my every day life. While the other type is academic writing, consisting mainly of note taking and writing papers. While I do write letters, this is not an integral part of my “writerly role".
Facebook and text messaging serve several purposes. A Facebook messages are very informal and are not a way to communicate a pertinent message, especially since some of my friends check their Facebook wall once every few days. An example of this is when my sister sends a message saying, “hey I haven’t talked to you in a while, how are you?” That message means that she either she doesn’t care about talking to me or more likely she was busy and only had time to send a quick message, which I also occasionally do. Text messages are also like Facebook messages but more direct and urgent. When I text somebody it’s usually to ask a simple question with a simple answer, or it is not important enough to warrant a phone call. Text messages differ from Facebook messages in that I use Facebook solely for friends whereas I text both friends and family. When I text my mom or dad I do not use the abbreviations that are standard for my generation, since neither my mom nor my dad understand what “idk” means. An example of a text message I would send to one of my friends is “what r u doing?” whereas if I were to send that to my parents it would say what are you doing?” Even though my parents are smart enough to understand what the former says, I use the latter since they are a different audience than my friends. Text messages and Facebook are more appropriate for communicating with my friends and not my parents, which I would use a more formal writing style.
In school the two main forms of writing are notes and papers. While my notes are generally short hand, my papers tend to be more formal and contain more complex and coherent sentences. When taking notes, the teacher might say, “In 1865 the Civil War ended,” while I would write, “1865 civil war over.” Since they are my notes, I know what the teacher said and am just saving myself time. Even though the writing style is different from how I write papers, the context in which I am writing is in an academic setting. When I write a paper, I am taking my thoughts and formatting them for an audience instead of taking what someone says and formatting it to what I think. Using the same example as above, if I were to write a paper on the Civil War, I would say, “In 1865 Grant accepted Lee’s surrender, which signaled the end of the Civil War.” Since this is for an audience in which I have to sound intelligent, and so if I were to write just what I had in my notes, I would sound like an illiterate fool.
The type of writing style that I use is dependant on who my audience is, even if I am using the same medium to write. A text message to my mom will be written differently than a text message to one of my friends even though I am communicating through a text message. My audience is the deciding factor in my style of writing whether it is a Facebook message or a formally written paper.